Muon_Neutrino

Well, electric *is* often a tight build.... I could certainly envision a situation where a couple slots and a few million for -KB IOs would be a small price to pay for a precious free power choice.

Problem with purple insps isn't cost, it's capacity. It doesn't matter how cheap they are when you can only hold such a limited number of them.

Shield defense seems to have been intended as a 'high offense, lower defense' type of armor set similar to fiery aura. It's got a mixture of melee/ranged/aoe defense, some +max HP, and some resistances for mitigation, but the total package is not as strong out of the box as most other secondaries. On the other hand, the aggro aura boosts your damage for each foe in range, and shield charge is a devastatingly powerful teleport/nuke style power (think lightning rod on steroids - if you haven't seen it, teleport to nearby location while doing a ton of AoE damage where you appear). It also has some minor ally-keyed elements (getting a bit of extra defense for allies in melee range of you, giving nearby allies a bit of defense in return), but they're mostly flavor.

There are two reasons that people are saying it's the 'best set' at the moment. First, shield charge is bugged and is doing more than twice as much damage as it's supposed to. This gives the set more AoE damage than some blasters. That's a short term advantage, as castle is aware of this and it's been confirmed to be on the chopping block.

The second reason is more fundamental. The set was designed as low survivability, high offense, but due to the way defense (as opposed to resistance) works in this game, even a 'low survivability' defense set can be made absurdly tough by stacking defense bonuses from IO sets on top of it. As designed, you're supposed to be able to push the set's defense up to a maximum of 30%ish, and that's with pool powers like weave and combat jumping added in. Without those you're sitting at 21%ish, which is low enough that you actually do have to worry a bit if you can't kill your foes fast enough. With people tossing around massive gobs of cash on IO sets, though, you can take those low defenses and ramp them all the way up to the 45% softcap, giving you the mitigation of an eluded SR scrapper 24/7. That completely negates the 'slightly squishy but offensively powerful' balance tradeoff in the set's design, and so you end up with one of the most powerful offensive *and* defensive sets in the game. It costs an absolute *ton* of cash, but it's very powerful once you've got it done.

(Fiery aura doesn't really suffer from this balance issue because it's resistance based instead of defense, and it's nigh impossible to stack significant amounts of resistance set bonuses.)

Without the purple set, it basically does nothing. Absolutely trivial ticks of damage (1/3rd that of brawl!) and a small chance for a 1.5 second minion-only confuse, each ticking every 4 seconds. As an enemy-affecting toggle, it also turns off every time a mezzer so much as sneezes at you. On the plus side, at least it doesn't cost much endurance, and it does look pretty.

With the purple set, it provides some decent set bonuses and the contagious confusion proc (whose effects are better in every way than the actual power) actually allows you to confuse some enemies. Until and unless you get to 50 and can afford that set, though, it's basically useless.

I was one of those first timers. I had a FF defender, and I think I ended up on the catch all team as the guy I was told to follow wasn't on that team. Wasn't exactly sure what was going on all the time, but I had fun.

I was a bit curious, as while that defender is my only 50 for now, I do have a few more approaching that level.

Are there any particular build or powerset necessities for tanks aside from having taunt? Does taunt itself have to be slotted any particular way? I know that the hamidon damage ignores normal resistance and defense, so is a self heal a must? Is normal tanker mez protection sufficient, or are breakfrees needed? I've got a shield tank coming up through the 40s, and now that I know these raids exist I'm wondering if she'd be useful.

For other ATs, I imagine scrapper and blaster roles are pretty straightforward. From what I saw, emp and rad seem to be desirable support sets for auras and AM. What about other support sets, are there any that bring anything especially useful?

When it comes to SO builds, one of the things that I think many often overlook is that not only do they lack set bonuses, they lack the increased enhancement percentages that come with IOs. My standard slotting for attack powers is the equivalent of 3 damage, almost 2 acc, and about 1 end and rech - in 5 slots with level 30 IOs! You can't do that with SOs at all. So not only do you want to pick powersets that work well with no set bonuses, you want powersets that can compensate for lower enhancement percentages.

For scrappers, my personal choice would be dark melee/invul. Tohit buffs in invincibility and the long-lasting, accurate soul drain offset lower accuracy, and dark melee's incredible bag of tricks makes up for having no survivability-oriented set bonuses. Even dark consumption, maligned as it is, could help with endurance issues. Only real problem is that it'll be a very tight build - you may have to forgo a travel power.

For controllers and corruptors, the answer is always the same: radiation emission. It brings everything an SO build needs: defense debuffs to help you hit, and recharge and recovery buffs to help you keep on hitting. Not to mention how strong of a survivability set it is and how many skippable powers it has, allowing you to really beef up your primary. For corruptors, dark miasma and traps give it stiff competition, and you couldn't go wrong with either of them, but rad is still a front runner.

For controllers, choice of primary probably depends on whether you are more interested in supporting the team or doing damage. For the former, I'd suggest earth, for the latter fire. Illusion and plant can somewhat fulfill both roles, albeit not as well as the specialists.

For corruptors, I'd suggest fire for your blast set. Fast recharges on the tier 1 and 2 blasts makes it much easier to string together a chain, and the strong damage all around lets it make a very good showing even on SOs.

Going back to more traditional mitigation calculations, one thing that might be good to add is a way to handle non-permanent max HP buffs. If you've got something like high pain tolerance or a +max hp set bonus, you can just put it into the HP box and be done. But if you've got something temporary like dull pain, it gets rather more complicated.

First off, your regeneration rates will be different with DP up and DP down. The overall regeneration rate will be an average weighted by the uptime of the power, which would be relatively simple to display pre-calculated on the sheet. Alternatively, you could simply calculate how much extra you regen over one cycle of the power compared to your base regen, and include that as a heal.

Second, the temporary +max HP effect will need to be quantified. The best way to deal with this, I find, is to treat it as a sort of pseudo-resistance. If you think in terms of 'fractions of your health bar', then a +max HP buff makes each incoming chunk of damage represent a smaller piece of your health and thus functions somewhat as a second layer of resistance that stacks multiplicatively with the first. The formula is:

pseudo resistance = 1 - (normal max HP/boosted HP)

This is then added multiplicatively with normal resistance as 1 - [(1 - resist)*(1 - pseudo resist)]. It could then be averaged in the same way as the tier 9 resistance values are.

I actually did this manually for my shield/mace build that's currently part of the document. One with the shield isn't providing the 49.6% S/L resistance indicated - it's providing 45%, and the other ~5% comes from the +max HP in the power. Similarly, my regen isn't actually 17.98 all the time - it's higher when OWtS is up, and lower when it's not, and that is just the weighted average. It would be nice to have this calculated automatically, though.

Finally, I second the suggestion for a 'X second survivability' column. I added a 60 second survivability column to my build's page, it's pretty trivial to calculate.

Actually, you can't chain activate it anymore. They added a 10 second suppression period after each activation, so the maximum it can be up for is 5 seconds out of every 15. That said, it's still very useful, just not as ridiculously much so as it used to be.

In the upper right corner, there should be a button that says "Mode: PvP". Click that to put your mids back into PvE mode so that it shows the correct numbers. Right now it's showing the PvP damage for TK thrust, which bears about as much resemblance to the PvE damage as I do to a buick.

The ally rez is nice too, a couple of my non-melee characters carry that around so that I can pop a fellow squishy back up with no wakie stun if they go down. Nothing game-breaking, but useful.

I habitually check the info displays of people I team with. First, because I like reading bios if they have them, and two to see what their builds look like. It helps me get a handle on how the team is likely to play if I can see what powerset combo they are, whether they've skipped critical powers, etc.

Doing this, my personal experience is that at least 50% (and probably more like 70%) of the people I play with have no set bonuses whatsoever. From that, I conclude that they're using SOs/commons, since even if you frankenslot and don't intentionally go for a single bonus, you're likely to end up with one or two anyway simply by accident.

Of the rest, they're about evenly split between people with extremely minimal bonuses (a single -kb or other unique, a couple of incidental frankenslotting bonuses, a few recovery bonuses, etc) and people with larger amounts of bonuses (ranging from moderate frankenslotting/cheap set bonus grabbing builds like I make all the way though to purpled out).

Yes, but it's not as worth it for those powers as you might think. Power boost will increase:

The -def and -tohit in radiation infection
Nothing out of enervating field
The movement slow in lingering radiation

However, on a toggle power the increased effect lasts only as long as the duration of power boost, which is only 15 seconds. So you can get better -def and -tohit, but only for a very short time, after which they will revert to the usual values. You can boost the movement slow in lingering rad for its full duration since it's a click, but that's not exactly very useful.

On the other hand, power boost will increase the heal from radiant aura, the runspeed and recovery buffs in accelerate metabolism (and *possibly* the mez resistance buffs, not sure), the endurance recovery buff for the target in mutation, the hold duration of any choking cloud pulses that occur while power boost is active, the -tohit and -defense of fallout, and the hold duration of EM pulse. If you were planning to get soul mastery anyway, it's probably a worthwhile power to get - just know it doesn't work very well on toggles.

I had this problem quite often on my old computer, hasn't cropped up yet here (crosses fingers). As you noted, it usually does connect eventually, but it takes forever. I never did figure out *why* it did that (it wasn't DNS issues, at least - did try that), but there were two ways I found to try and deal with the problem.

First, you can add a flag to the shortcut that causes it to bypass the updater and go straight to the loading screen. Right click on the shortcut and hit properties. The 'target' box should have something along the lines of this in it:

"C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe"

At the end, after the quote mark, add the flag -project "coh", so it looks like this:

"C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe" -project "coh"

This will enable you to get into the game without dealing with the updater. (If it doesn't work, try deleting the quote marks around 'coh' - I'm not sure whether they're supposed to be there or not.)

However, this will fail if there actually is an update to be downloaded, since you won't have the same version as the server and you'll get an error message when trying to connect. You'll need to have a second shortcut to the updater (just copy the existing one) without the -project "coh" flag so that it actually tries to update.

Of course, then you'll have to deal with the connection issue. The only way I found to try to get around this is rather a kludge. I noticed that on rare occasions, the updater would actually connect quickly even though it usually took forever. Thus, if you just put the mouse over the updater and hammer the button for 20 seconds or so to launch 30 or 40 copies of the updater, *one* of them will usually connect in relatively short order. I usually ended up spreading them all out over my desktop so that I could see the text in the lower left corner of each one and tell if it had connected. Once one has connected, you can just close all the rest and let it update. Don't worry about more than one trying to connect - on the rare occasion where that happens, the second one will just pop up an error box about the updater already being running and no harm will be done.

Procs in toggles like damage auras only have a chance to go off once every ten seconds. At level 50, a damage proc does 72 damage. With a 20% chance to go off, on average that's 14.4 damage per proc every ten seconds.

In ten seconds, death shroud will pulse 5 times for (at level 50) 44.5 damage. So adding one damage SO will increase its damage by 44.5 * 0.33 = 14.7 damage over ten seconds.

So if you're looking to increase the damage that your aura does, plain old damage SOs/IOs are just as effective as procs, and are far cheaper. Additionally, they increase damage for each pulse instead of procing once every ten seconds, and they don't rely on a percentage chance to go off, so they're more reliable.

On a side note, 3 end in death shroud is kinda overkill. The first two save you something like .21 end/s, but the third only adds another .045 or so. Drop one and you've got room for 3 damage, which will really help if you're running missions with lots of weak foes.

One thing that is easily overlooked is that earthquake has an enhanceable 10% tohit debuff, which could be very useful if you've already got some defense from scorpion shield or whatnot. It's got a nice long duration and can be up pretty often with some investment. Stacking 10-15% or so tohit debuff could definitely improve survivability if it's layered on top of 30%ish defense.

[Edit: je saist posted while I was writing. All I have to say is, I don't know where you were getting your info from, but you're completely wrong about aggro holding. Both white and black dwarf get an identical aoe taunt power, which can pretty reasonably keep aggro on about 5 enemies. Black dwarf gets *no* other aggro holding besides single target taunts in its attacks, while white dwarf gets a taunt effect on a PBAoE that will eventually be going off every 8-10 seconds. Black dwarfs by no means hold aggro better than white dwarfs. In fact, its quite emphatically the other way around. Also, you end up with almost 60% resistance to all but psi, not 70-72%.]

Black dwarf has better damage thanks to mire. Also, black dwarf drain with only 66% heal/rech slotting heals more over time than white dwarf sublimation with 95%/95%. So black dwarf is actually more damaging and has probably about as much survivability.

However, there is more to tanking than simple toughness, and it's here that the difference lies. Black dwarf mire has no taunt effect. Thus, without extreme slotting you're only going to keep 5 targets taunted, plus another 2 or 3 from your single target attacks. Quite simply, this is a royal pain in the butt. It is by far the most annoying thing I've found about playing my warshade - I jump into a spawn, toss out a taunt+mire, start hitting things, and then 2/3rds of them peel off as soon as anyone else throws an AoE.

On the other hand, white dwarf flare does have a taunt effect. Jump into a spawn and hit flare and taunt, and you've got aggro on 15 targets that's not letting go. Regardless of the small differences between them in other areas, this all by itself is enough to unambiguously give white dwarfs the tanking crown, in my opinion. Specifically for tanking, I would want a white dwarf over a black dwarf anyday.

Comparing them to tankers is a bit harder. By themselves, they're more or less tankers with no aggro auras, 58% resistance to all but psi, some form of self heal, and none of the other defensive tricks some tankers have. On their own, they're more or less in the same ballpark, but they're definitely not equal to granite/invul vs S/L/etc. Put em on a team with 3 scrappers/blasters (peacebringer) or 3 defenders/tanks (warshade), though, and suddenly they're running around with 85% resist all, which makes them quite competitive indeed. (On a side note, peacebringers get resistance from offensive teammates, which is another reason why I think they're better at tanking. You hardly *need* 85% resist all if there's 3 defenders/tankers on the team, after all!)

Voids don't 'destroy' dwarf form khelds, since the quantum damage is no longer unresistable. They're still threats and do a fair chunk of damage, of course, but as long as you put them down reasonably quickly it's not too bad.

As far as I know, nictus/novas/dwarves that appear in spawns don't do extra damage. I believe it's just voids/quants.

This is my obligatory 'joke catgirl' character, sparked purely by a joking suggestion of the name by someone here on the forums a long time ago. Unfortunately, 'Schrodinger's Catgirl' is one character too long, so the apostrophe had to get the axe. I think it works out well regardless.

Illusion/sonic, with recall, teleport, and the day job rez other. Got it all - quantum duplication, quantum teleportation, strange noise-based powers, putting teammates into superpositions of being alive and dead, confusing the heck out of people and leaving them trembling in fear with the mind-bendingly crazy math involved...

..... sigh. Why do I always forget about that problem? That was it, thank you very much. Now I feel like a proper idiot, glad I didn't submit that bug report!

I was fiddling with a character's costume in icon, and I ran into a really strange bug (?). I set everything up, accepted the changes, and then ran off to where I wanted to take a screenshot of the character. When I toggled off superior invisibility and actually got a look at the character, I discovered that the color on a couple of her costume pieces was wrong. I figured I just screwed up in the costume editor, so I trekked back to icon only to discover that, in the costume editor window, everything was the way I had wanted it. But once I leave the editor, it just doesn't take.

The specific pieces affected were:

-- The tights -> ulterior top with the 'savage' pattern. The primary color was supposed to be pale orange and the secondary a dark grey, but in-game the secondary color always shows up as black.

-- The cyborg belt. Primary color supposed to be white, secondary color gold, but the secondary color again shows up as black.

The funny thing is that in the window that pops up to select which costume to modify, things show up correctly. It's a bit tough to see in this screenshot (I never noticed before just how bad the lighting is in icon! ), but look at the belt and the seam between the top and the bottom.



It also shows up correctly in the character selection screen (although it won't let me take a screenshot of it for some reason). If anyone knows what the cause might be, whether this is a known issue, or if you could try to reproduce this, I would be grateful.

If it matters, my graphics card is a radeon 5850, I've got the 10.5 drivers, I'm running windows 7 64 bit, my graphics settings are all maxed except that ambient occlusion is off and shadows are on the middle setting, and this is a brand new computer I just put together last week.

More than likely, shriek-scream-repeat. Just shriek, even at the recharge cap, will still take .6s to recharge after it's done casting. Adding in scream will more than fill that gap while adding even more (and longer duration) -res.

I haven't done the big number crunching to confirm, though - the -resist stacking and the staggered durations makes it rather complicated. I'd guess that shriek-scream-repeat will still beat out shriek on auto, though.

In my opinion, the reason to go ice/ice (besides theme) is so that between your AoE slow powers and your attacks things are slowed to smithereens incidentally without you really having to worry much about it. Chilling embrace, though, is not part of that as far as I'm concerned.

Basically the problem is that, in my opinion, chilling embrace is redundant with arctic air instead of complementary. Arctic air with even 1 slow enhancer (mine has a pair of end/slow/rech IOs in it, which works out to 1 slow) slows stuff effectively to a halt already. It also applies a -50% recharge debuff, which is most of the way to the -75% cap.

Chilling embrace doesn't really add anything to what arctic air already does. It doesn't add anything in terms of movement slowing, since anything within its meager 10 foot radius is already within arctic air's huge 25 foot radius and moving at a snails pace anyway. And it doesn't add much in terms of recharge slowing, because its very small radius means that any one foe won't be in range for very long as you bounce around and they try to run (very slowly) out of range.

In any situation where you'd actually want more slowing than what arctic air provides, chilling embrace doesn't really help since it's basically arctic air's baby brother. If the situation is such that arctic air is ill suited to the task (such as foes who are so dangerous up close that you don't want to melee them), chilling embrace is also more than likely disqualified. If you want a second slow to back up arctic air, I'd instead look at shiver. It requires little slotting (just a bit of acc and recharge), has a huge area of effect, and its nature as a 'sticky' click debuff makes it a good counterpart to arctic air.

I was gonna go /pain too, but I couldn't get the pain powers to look right. Is there any combo of colors that actually gets them to have a bright, saturated look? They always looked either very dim and dark or grey and washed out.